Several years ago I stumbled upon disturbing information regarding my alma mater, the Harvard Medical School (HMS).† Its professed commitment to investigate implausible medical claims had somehow metamorphosed into the advocacy of such claims. I’ve previously mentioned some of this on SBM (here and here). A couple of pertinent essays appeared in the public domain in 2002 and 2003, but the full story was much more involved than those pieces revealed. In the wake of recent posts on SBM about medical schools exposing students to uncritical portrayals of pseudomedicine, it seems appropriate to tell more of it. I’ve also decided to name names, which is something that I would have been reticent to do a few years ago. The basis for that decision will become clear over the next few posts, I trust. This topic will require at least three posts.

My discovery that HMS had begun promoting pseudoscientific medical claims was occasioned by my experience on the Massachusetts Special Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medical Practitioners, which met from the fall of 2001 to the winter of 2003. Another member of that commission was David Eisenberg, the Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Alternative Medicine Research and Education (CAMRE) and of the new Osher Center for Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies. Dr. Eisenberg is best known for his 1993 article reporting the use of ‘unconventional therapies’ by Americans. He had been appointed to the commission by the MA Commissioner of Public Health at the time, Dr. Howard Koh–whom President Obama has recently nominated to be Assistant Secretary of HHS. I assumed then, and still do, that Dr. Koh presumed Dr. Eisenberg to be an objective expert on “CAM,” since that was the persona presented by HMS and by Dr. Eisenberg himself. I had my doubts, but before then I’d not bothered to look into the matter.

It was during commission meetings, when I had the opportunity to hear what Dr. Eisenberg and his surrogate had to say or not to say and when I examined some of their writings and funding sources, that I began to realize how far his project was deviating from what I imagined to be the agenda of HMS. Some of what I saw amounted to frank dishonesty: failure to disclose obvious conflicts of interest to the Commission, for example. I also discovered public promotions of dubious “CAM” practices and practitioners by the CAMRE, in spite of its formal purpose being that of investigating “CAM” practices in an attempt to find out if any might be useful. I was concerned enough to look at other “CAM” information offered in the name of Harvard, and I found more worrisome examples.

I also attended the Feb., 2001 Harvard Complementary and Integrative Medicine Course, directed by Dr. Eisenberg (here is a link to the similar 2002 course brochure). A few of the talks were reasonable, if banal. I did my best to give them the benefit of the doubt, because I still could not accept that HMS would seriously consider homeopathy, ‘life-force,’ and ‘subluxations’ as being worthy of study, much less advocacy. After attending a semi-rigorous talk on raw herbs as medicines (the presenter discussed some studies but not the looming question of why whole herbs might be preferable to purified molecules), I ran into Eisenberg and did my best to be polite and encouraging. I shouldn’t have, because most of the content of the course was misleading and pseudoscientific. Overall, its tone was more like a political rally or a religious revival than a scientific conference.

At that course I ran into Russell Phillips, who had been in my group of interns at the Beth Israel Hospital (Boston) in 1979. I’d seen him around from time to time over the years, and I’d known that he’d stayed on at the BI after his residency. I was surprised, however, to learn that he was now the Director of the Harvard CAMRE Fellowship program. I was even more surprised to learn, during a short conversation with him, that he was innocent of the chiropractic ‘subluxation theory’ and that he’d never heard of Quackwatch. It seemed to me that there was either a surprising naïveté among this crowd or an attempt by some to shun unpleasant information. (more…)

David Gorski suggested I expand on a comment I left recently on one of his November posts. His subject was the then new documentary movie, “A Beautiful Truth.“ “Truth” is about the Gerson method – the dietary deprivation cum coffee enema cancer treatment developed by Dr. Max Gerson, a refugeee from Germany I the 1930s. His daughter, Charlotte now runs the Gerson Institute in Tijuana, Mexico. Gerson is one of the models for the Gonzales method recently reviewed by Kim Atwood.

I had previously referred to the movie in a prior post (1) (but in a different context. Here I’ll explore the movie from a different angle – with its partners, propaganda documentaries.

David called my attention to “Truth” plus another by the same producer – with trailers on You Tube. When I watched the trailers last year I saw myself interviewed briefly, but could not recall being filmed, or even identify where the scene took place. I had to email Steve Barrett, also in the movie, who reminded me about filmmaker Steve Kroschel’s visits 2-3 years before, although neither did he have strong memory of the interview.(more…)

Triumph of the Heart, as its name does not suggest, is about science. The book’s author, Jie Jack Li, is a medicinal chemist who meticulously reviews the history relevant to the discovery of lipid-lowering drugs. He spares no details, even recounting the amusing quarrels and quirks of the scientists engaged in the “apocryphal showdowns” leading to the manufacture of cholesterol in a laboratory.

The personalities of the various scientists and Nobel laureates described in the book are highly entertaining. From beating one another with umbrellas, to insisting on wearing blue clothing only, to egos so large and unappealing as to empty an entire academic center of all its promising young recruits, one has the distinct impression that brilliance does not go hand-in-hand with grace.

That being said, each of these scientists did seem to share a common approach to research: carefully testing hypotheses, repeating peer study results to confirm them, and patiently exploring complex biochemical pathways over periods of decades. The physicians, physicists, and chemists showed an incredible ability to doggedly pursue answers to specific questions – understanding that the results might influence human health. But even more importantly, they were each willing to invest their careers in analysis that may never lead to anything more than a dead end. In fact, the book is full of examples of great ideas, developed over decades, that did not lead to a marketable drug. In some cases the research was halted due to lack of efficacy, in others political forces or personal whims influenced the course.(more…)

Jenny McCarthy, regular readers of SBM know, has been a frequent target of criticism here. The reasons, of course, are very simple. She has become the most famous public face of the antivaccine movement, releasing a book every year or so since 2007 about how her son Evan has been “cured” of autism through the dubious biomedical treatments she’s given him and how it was vaccines that supposedly caused her son’s autism. Most recently, she’s releasing a paean to antivaccine views and autism quackery entitled Healing and Preventing Autism: A Complete Guide, co-authored by Dr. Jerry Kartzinel. Dr. Kartzinel, some may recall, wrote the foreword to Jenny McCarthy’s very first paean to autism quackery back in 2007 and was properly lambasted by Autism Diva and Kevin Leitch for writing
things like:

Autism, as I see it, steals the soul from a child; then, if allowed, relentlessly sucks life’s marrow out of the family members, one by one…”

Sometimes, in order to appreciate just how wrong antivaccinationist are, it’s best to let them speak in their own words. Nowhere recently have I seen a better example of this than in an interview with Jenny McCarthy published on the TIME Magazine website. In it, along with the usual invocation of the “toxins gambit” and appeals to anecdotal evidence over science, Jenny reveals that she clearly thinks it’s regrettable but acceptable that infectious diseases will return because of the efforts of her and her fellow antivaccine activists:(more…)

The LA Times recently published their analysis of data provided them by the state of California and found that there are pockets of high rates of exemption from vaccines among kindergarteners. In the US public schools require that all children receive the recommended vaccines. However, states can allow exemptions for the religious beliefs of the parents.

Over the years anti-vaccine activists have been successful in many states in expanding the rules for exemption. In California, for example, parents may seek excemption if they have “philosophical” objections to vaccines – which means there really isn’t any criteria beyond the parent’s wishes. The anti-vaccine movement has been active not only in pushing for the weakening of vaccine requirements but also in teaching parents how to use the laws to evade vaccination for their children.

The LA Times found that, while state wide the exemption rate was only 2%, exemptions were largely clustered in certain schools. They report:

In all, more than 10,000 kindergartners started school last fall with vaccine exemptions, up from about 8,300 the previous school year. In 1997, when enrollment was higher, the number of exempted kindergartners was 4,318.

and

At Ocean Charter School in Del Rey, near Marina del Rey, 40% of kindergartners entering school last fall and 58% entering the previous year were exempted from vaccines, the highest rates in the Los Angeles Unified School District.